I am because CEOs are. Look where the puck is going. Sorry to update your p(doom) priors in this way, it was obvious to anyone paying attention years ago conditioned on uplift trend persisting. Trend persisted and here we are.
Welcome to the new world. People start to repeat what tech founders preach. They do not require humans in the mix. Peter Thiel gave a good example of that mindset in a (mostly) recent interview where he didn't have an answer on "Should humanity survive?"
Yes. Hiring people has various benefits, I will lay them out for you:
- They learn the domain of your product, which means long term ownership and knowledge establishes itself. If you've only ever shipped SaaS slop, you might not know, but lots of companies are solving real world problems that have no better solution. Owning and understanding the code and the domain is key.
- They will learn from their mistakes (no LLM does this).
- Human skill is a REAL moat. Once you build a team that fully understands and is skilled in the domain you work in, these people are going to be the thing that sets you apart. If some of them are particularly social or charming, let them sit in with you for meetings and watch them provide loads of value, for no added cost.
- If Claude or OpenAI is down, they will continue thinking. In fact, they will continue thinking even when off the clock! This is a neat little hack called "consciousness" where you get a lot of work for free!
- You can hire people who punch above their weight; not everyone you hire needs to be a 500k/year staff software prime engineer of doom, you can just spend some time and effort to hire good juniors/competent mediors who will think for themselves (gasp!) and get work done.
- You still get ALL THE BENEFITS OF AI!!!! They can use AI just like you can, or better!
- You get people who you can brainstorm with, which is distinctly different from LLMs because your employees are less likely to want to suck you dry in every sentence just to make sure you spend more tokens. Employees don't care if you love them, they care about the quality of their work if you manage them correctly and reward that.
- They are quite loyal if you treat them right; spend a little more on their well-being, and they will stick around, come in to work every day and deliver cool things with you.
- Humans can only manage, review and give tasks to so many agents. If you add more humans, you can handle more agents.
An expensive LLM and a lot of extra tooling gets you some of this, yes, but not all of it. With humans you can still do the expensive LLM and extra tooling if you end up making enough money anyway.
- AI isn't bound by need for rest, vacations, sick days, or labor laws
- AI doesn't bounce from company to company, taking your business knowledge with it (actually this isn't technically true based on the practices of AI companies, but that's not a technical requirement)
- AI doesn't join a union and stop work in demand for higher pay or workers rights
This is what CEOS and capitalists are thinking. For capital, the best outcome is to not have any labor at all. And if you can do that when your competitors can't, then you have a huge market advantage. (Slop notwithstanding)
I'm not saying this is a "good thing" but this is what drives the market. Less labor revenue in the long term and money printing machines.
will they be a better investment than your current staff engineer with fable token allowance?
Are you seriously asking if employing people, for the same cost, is a better ‘investment’ than relying on LLMs? Jesus Christ.
I am because CEOs are. Look where the puck is going. Sorry to update your p(doom) priors in this way, it was obvious to anyone paying attention years ago conditioned on uplift trend persisting. Trend persisted and here we are.
I’m asking this question right now.
Welcome to the new world. People start to repeat what tech founders preach. They do not require humans in the mix. Peter Thiel gave a good example of that mindset in a (mostly) recent interview where he didn't have an answer on "Should humanity survive?"
https://youtu.be/ngtp3v1_nCI
Yes. Hiring people has various benefits, I will lay them out for you:
- They learn the domain of your product, which means long term ownership and knowledge establishes itself. If you've only ever shipped SaaS slop, you might not know, but lots of companies are solving real world problems that have no better solution. Owning and understanding the code and the domain is key.
- They will learn from their mistakes (no LLM does this).
- Human skill is a REAL moat. Once you build a team that fully understands and is skilled in the domain you work in, these people are going to be the thing that sets you apart. If some of them are particularly social or charming, let them sit in with you for meetings and watch them provide loads of value, for no added cost.
- If Claude or OpenAI is down, they will continue thinking. In fact, they will continue thinking even when off the clock! This is a neat little hack called "consciousness" where you get a lot of work for free!
- You can hire people who punch above their weight; not everyone you hire needs to be a 500k/year staff software prime engineer of doom, you can just spend some time and effort to hire good juniors/competent mediors who will think for themselves (gasp!) and get work done.
- You still get ALL THE BENEFITS OF AI!!!! They can use AI just like you can, or better!
- You get people who you can brainstorm with, which is distinctly different from LLMs because your employees are less likely to want to suck you dry in every sentence just to make sure you spend more tokens. Employees don't care if you love them, they care about the quality of their work if you manage them correctly and reward that.
- They are quite loyal if you treat them right; spend a little more on their well-being, and they will stick around, come in to work every day and deliver cool things with you.
- Humans can only manage, review and give tasks to so many agents. If you add more humans, you can handle more agents.
An expensive LLM and a lot of extra tooling gets you some of this, yes, but not all of it. With humans you can still do the expensive LLM and extra tooling if you end up making enough money anyway.
- AI works 24 hours a day
- AI isn't bound by need for rest, vacations, sick days, or labor laws
- AI doesn't bounce from company to company, taking your business knowledge with it (actually this isn't technically true based on the practices of AI companies, but that's not a technical requirement)
- AI doesn't join a union and stop work in demand for higher pay or workers rights
This is what CEOS and capitalists are thinking. For capital, the best outcome is to not have any labor at all. And if you can do that when your competitors can't, then you have a huge market advantage. (Slop notwithstanding)
I'm not saying this is a "good thing" but this is what drives the market. Less labor revenue in the long term and money printing machines.
I’m sorry sir this is HN, your post is too sensible.